etcd is the key-value store for {product-title}, which persists the state of all resource objects.
Back up your cluster’s etcd data regularly and store in a secure location ideally outside the {product-title} environment. Do not take an etcd backup before the first certificate rotation completes, which occurs 24 hours after installation, otherwise the backup will contain expired certificates. It is also recommended to take etcd backups during non-peak usage hours, as it is a blocking action.
Once you have an etcd backup, you can recover from lost master hosts and restore to a previous cluster state.
You can perform the etcd data backup process on any master host that has connectivity to the etcd cluster, where the proper certificates are provided.